Election 2008, and all that
So. Um. Hillary Clinton received more votes in the Nevada Caucuses. Barack Obama received one more delegate. And, um, this is an amazing comeback for Clinton because after falling from a 20 point lead to her 6 point victory, she won with the Culinary Union endorsing Obama.
Our electoral system is just a bit dumb.
The storyline we’ve been treated to, as exemplified by the thrust of the debate questions attempting to instigate a Race Riot, starts somewhere with the Clintons floating the name of Lyndon Johnson as an unsexy grunt-figure in pushing civil rights and then ends… ends roughly with with the heckler shouting to get to something more important.
Or maybe it commences with Rush Limbaugh trolling through the political zietgeist for any hook at all so he can do a “comedy” bit based on strong enunciations of the words “spade” and “ho”. Hillary Clinton says that Obama has not done the “spade work”, and that is enough for Limbaugh. We can expect more of this from that man, the ruse being something about “liberal hypocrisy”. I can’t say I would have noticed had anyone come forth with the term “spade work”, and further I can’t say Limbaugh is on the winning side of the political fence at the moment — his antics I’m more bemused by and find just kind of sad — this is 2008 as opposed to 1994.
But. Maybe one has to explain Obama’s reference to Ronald Reagan. There are a number of directions to take that, starting with the reality that Reagan won two landslide elections, and that Reagan spent the 1980 election quoting FDR, Truman, and Kennedy, lest he be saddled with Nixon. But the problem comes in further with his commentary, his Audacity, in referencing himself as a “transformative candidate”. Which is something he sort of needs to be as opposed to say, if he indeed is.
Stylistically, I get a tad stunned by Obama, and I gather it is costing him votes in the primaries. His particular message and brand of “Changes” suggests that the Republican Party will “change” right along with him. In the realm of practical politics, there is no getting around the dirty and uncomfortable and necessary reality of partisan politics, and the Partisan Fight, which Obama’s Rhetoric seems to preclude – unless he is planning on bowing down to that which his partisan opponents believe, incorporated into what he is following through with. It is sort of flumoxing and disappointing, and something Obama is probably going to have to figure out, lest he watch the primary voter gravitate toward Clinton…
… Though that brings up a particularly odd irony of figuring out what policies they were brawling through in the 1990s…
This is all glass half empty stuff. The Glass Half Full is to simply point out that Huckabee wants God’s Law to supercede the Constitution and made that old Gay Marriage = Bestiality Marriage canard, and that McCain is going to follow our enemies to the Gates of Hell, wherever that is in his mind. Mitt Romney is the best bet on the Republicans,  because he’s just phoney enough he might just be phoney to where he doesn’t quite believe himself right now.
And so it goes.